Friday, July 4, 2008

This writing can be regarded as a small tip to become a hacker. Note that the term hacker is misunderstood by different people. A hacker can be a programming hacker, Internet hacker, etc and this writing can be applied to anything. The first and foremost thing in becoming a hacker is choosing the right and interesting problems to solve (This depends on one's interest). The second thing is doing things differently or trying to solve a problem in a different way. This develops the ability to research and increases our curiosity towards a particular thing.

Next is developing skill sets required to become a hacker. This needs time, hard work and dedication. Most of us (including me) are content with just a few high level languages. To gain a firm understanding of "How Computers really work", learning assembly language is a must (If I had known this in my childhood I would have chosen it as the first language!). There is an excellent book which answers the above question (Assembly Language Step by Step: Programming in DOS and Linux by Jeff Duntemann). I think it's a book which should be in every computer programmer's bookshelf. Moreover there are numerous books and documentation available for every software which makes learning new things easier. The third is publishing interesting articles or manuals which may be of interest to other hackers. I feel that doing these things consistently would make one a hacker in his profession.

The below things may be of interest to Network hackers.

If one is new to networking, then a good understanding of sockets is a must to start things.Though there a lot of Network progamming tutorials available in the Web , most of them concentrate on only a single programming language. I've written a Generic Socket programming tutorial in four programming languages namely Python , Perl, C and Java which mainly concentrates on how to communicate with two machines using TCP/IP and UDP/IP protocols irrespective of the programming language used to implement the server and client and also a very simple example of using raw sockets in Perl which will definitely be useful.

The other thing is learning about basic exploits (an introductory article can be found here). There is a wonderful tutorial on the basics of Linux Hackingavailable here. There are many useful references available in the web. Only learning and experimenting things would make one a hacker.

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About Me

Hi, I am Prasanna Seshadri, Software Engineer from CA, USA. My primary purpose behind blogging is to share some of my views about technology, best practices, code and technical tips which may be useful for others (of course I don't ignore the fun part). I blog to do more value add to users and sometimes the disappointment of not getting a solution through Google also inspires me to blog if I find one.